Ever since its inception, there have been problems with Compiz; people unsatisfied with the direction of the project forked it, then they merged again. Recently, the project, now known as Compiz Fusion, faced other problems, such as multiple branches and a lack of direction. A major reorganisation of the project is supposed to fix all this.

Compiz came out of Novell, pioneered by David Reveman, but was soon forked due to dissatisfaction with the way Novell handled the project. The fork, known as Beryl, would eventually merge with the original Compiz to form Compiz Fusion. With Reveman's involvement declining, the project got into disarray, leading to various contributors managing their own branches with severe architectural differences. With Kristian Lyngstol's effort to push the developers towards consensus, the project has now been unified once again.

During several conference calls, Compiz developers have created a council which will lead the Compiz effort. The council consists of five established Compiz developers, and will "work openly and will
encourage open discussion and decision-making, but will take charge where it feels it is necessary to retain momentum." First order of business for the council was to set a roadmap, which looks like this:

Merge Compiz and Compiz Fusion both in name and support systems. We are now using just Compiz as the name, and Compiz is moving away from Freedesktop entirely. Details are still being worked out.

Release Compiz 0.8.0. Expect a release schedule later this evening.

Merge Compiz++ to master.

Release Compiz 0.9.0. This will happen shortly after the merge of Compiz++ is finished to allow for testing and feedback.

Release Compiz 0.9.2. This will happen a few weeks after 0.9.0 as a pure bug-fix/cleanup release, with no major changes.

At this point we will look at Nomad. If Nomad is ready to merge, we will aim for a 0.9.4 release which will include Nomad, and a 0.9.6 release which, similar to 0.9.2, will be a bug-fix/cleanup release.

If Nomad is not ready, we will go over the option handling in 0.9.4, and push Nomad back as necessary. Otherwise, the option handling will be overhauled in the release after the Nomad bug-fix.

During the 0.9 development cycle, the developers will also focus on code cleanup, and they warn that the 0.9 development bracnh will be highly volatile.